License Management API

This module was designed to handle licensing and subscription functionalities. The data model for the module consists of both metadata and runtime data. Product and license definitions are included in the metadata (master data) part. It represents information about the products that are sold (be them online of offline) and their corresponding license definitions. The license definition represents the information about one offer of the product -- if it is free, test or paid, when it expires, what contract template it has in SAP, etc. License definitions come in packs, bundles or single instances. Products can be offline or online. Online products are also called services and are represented in the data model by service definitions. Offline products (such as books) cannot have license definitions -- they are not bought online.

The runtime data represents purchased licenses and license assignments. It is important to understand a couple of terms while working with the license management module: purchased license is the instance of the license that is bought. A license assignment represents the right to use a purchased license. A license assignment cannot exist without a purchased license. A buy user is the user that purchased the license. An admin user is the user of the license and it is connected to the assignment. A debitor is the company connected to the buy user and it holds all the billing information. Licenses can be bought in packs. Licenses can be bought for bundles, in which case individual assignments for the contents of the bundle are created, provided that the license definition for the bundle specifies this (for instance newsletters that are part of the bundle require individual license assignments, as further subscriptions to external systems are necessary).

A purchased license in HGSP, created via the REST interfaces, is not a confirmed license until the contract number is received from SAP (meaning that the data was validated and a contract was created). The process of creating a purchased license ends in a call to SAP. A callback from SAP is expected in order to update the data for the purchased license with the contract number. Confirmation from SAP is not necessary, obviously, for test or free licenses.

The mechanism of adding extra processing depending on the license definition for a product is implemented with plugins. Every license definition contains a plugin field which holds the name of the java class that must be instantiated and called on assignment creation, deletion or expiration.

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